NEW YORK, NY.- Sgorbati Projects is presenting Impossible Atmosphere, an exhibition of artworks by Kyla Chevrier, Anne Truitt, and Maria Walker. The exhibition was conceived in conversation with artist Gabriela Salazar. The work of influential sculptor Anne Truitt is employed as a starting point to explore the connectivity of painting and sculpture, and the relationship of atmosphere to form, color and surface.
Salazar writes of the exhibition: The mystery of paint, form, and vision coalescing in the corner of the inner eye to conjure space, light, and mood. How to force the inescapability of material into air, light, and shadow, while simultaneously reiterating—insisting—on materiality? Where do substance, structure, and sublimity abut? What captures, embodies, fractures the impossible precision of atmosphere?
Exhibited is Anne Truitt’s Parva LVIII, 2002, a small, intimate sculpture measuring 12 1/8 by 12 by 3 inches, created two years before the artist’s death in 2004. Through Truitt's meticulous process of applying multiple layers of finely sanded gesso and pigment to a wood structure, color, while still resting on the surface, is relieved from its support. Primarily a pale blue/green, Parva LVIII reveals the reductive nature of Truitt’s work, heightened not only by a shift in scale—her practice most associated with larger, floor standing sculpture—but also through the subtlety of a thin green line towards the base of the work. The color of this line, nearly indistinguishable from the color above, almost tricks the eye to question its existence.
Kyla Chevrier created a site-specific installation through the construction of vertical planes which interrupt the architecture of the gallery. The given conditions of the room as exhibition space are changed, and the experience of the viewer is altered. Dramatic interventions which structure programatic movement are balanced with the nuance of natural light as it is redirected against the colored surfaces of the installation. The colors are derived from Chevrier’s personal archive documenting the synesthetic relationship of color to specific people and places.
Maria Walker presents work from her Window Series, an ongoing group of paintings based on the dimensions of her studio windows. Walker’s paintings are continually bound by their fundamental materials—wood, canvas and paint. Here, the physical framework of the windows is recalled in the painting’s stretchers, reconfigured to shape unprimed canvas which is then stained with pigment. The physical nature of the work is in contrast to the etherial qualities of their presence. The paintings, almost inexplicably, recreate the movement of light and air through the windows at a given time of day.
Kyla Chevrier (b. Ottawa, Canada 1985) lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA in 2008 from Concordia University in Montreal QC, before graduating from Yale University’s MFA Sculpture program in 2010 where she was awarded the Toby Devon Lewis Foundation Grant. She has exhibited her work both in Canada and the U.S., as well as attended several residencies including The MacDowell Colony and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Anne Truitt (1921 - 2004) A major figure in American art, Truitt’s highly reductive painted wood sculpture, while uniquely set apart from her contemporaries, has led to her being grouped with minimalists such as Judd, Andre and LeWitt, and her use of color has invited associations with painters of the same generation. While the artist and her work are not easily categorized, Truitt’s objectives are clear, “What I want is color in three dimensions, color set free to a point where, theoretically, the support should dissolve into pure color.” Anne Truitt’s journals, Daybook, Turn and Prospect have been reissued in paperback by Penguin books. She has been shown in one-person exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
Maria Walker (b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1980) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art in 2006 and her BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2002, where she also completed a Capstone Project in Poetry. She attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 2011, and received an Individual Grant from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development in 2013. Walker’s work has been published in the Smithsonian Magazine and reviewed as a Critic’s Pick on Artforum.com, as well as in the Brooklyn Rail, New American Paintings, Beautiful Decay, and Two Coats of Paint. Walker will have a solo show of her work this fall at Projekt722 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Gabriela Salazar (b. New York 1981) lives and works in New York City. She received an MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from Yale University. Solo projects include For Closure (Outdoors, the Bronx), a monumental public art piece with the Bronx River Art Center / DOT; and Site Set at the Luchsinger Gallery, CT. Her work has been included in group shows across the country and has appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, and The New Yorker. Salazar has been in residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture ; this Fall she is participating in the Workspace residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Salazar’s current work, In Advance of a Storm (for Luis and Antonia) (for A and L) (for parents) (for two), a n outdoor sculpture made possible by The Lighthouse Works, can be seen on Fishers Island, NY through mid- September.
